Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @10:10AM
from the drumsticks-are-free dept.

First time accepted submitter caseyb89 writes "Beat making software is incredibly expensive, and the high price limits usage to those who can afford it. Two professors at UNC have a dream of allowing all artists access to beat making software, regardless of income level. They are rallying the community on a project to create open source beat making software. The two professors double as DJs and hip hop artists, and they recently spoke at Rio+Social."

But Hip Hop artists just pirate whatever software they need. The only real expense are decent microphones, mixers, preamps and speakers.

full disclosure: I am a sound engineer living in NC who works with hiphop artists.

This.

Though their producers at least make some effort now to reduce their legal exposure by seeking the rights to the sample or knowing just how much they can get away with, rather than blatantly ripping off an drum track from another artist -- lest they end up in court coughing up all of their profits.

I'll get off your lawn. Yours is a really narrow minded view. The fact is, both 'real' musicians and people who can't play at all benefit greatly from the myriad of music software and hardware that have come along in the past 20 years. Using your logic (no pun intended) we should remove technology from music completely and go back to only using our voices, clapping our hands and banging rock and sticks. Think about a piano for example. It is a technological marvel. Should we ban it just because it makes it too easy and the musician doesn't even have to pluck or strike the strings? I consider myself a real musician and I am very happy indeed to make use of whatever tools are available.

A piano really isn't a technological marvel and never was. Even at the time, it was seen as a fairly straightforward improvement upon the harpsichord and the clavichord, the main difference between a piano and the latter being that the piece that strikes the string does not remain in contact with it. The mechanism was a definite improvement, but it was very much an incremental improvement over existing technology, the fundamentals of which are merely a more modern version of the hammered dulcimer/santur,

What you're missing is that electronic synthesis is an incremental advancement relative to other computer technology and to some extent relative to audio recording technology, but it is not an incremental advancement relative to other musical instrument technology. It is an entirely different way of producing sound that pretty much spontaneously appeared in the past century out of nowhere.

For tens of thousands of years, musical instruments produced sounds because of a player striking something, plucking s

For tens of thousands of years, musical instruments produced sounds because of a player striking something, plucking something, or blowing air over or through a tube (sometimes involving a reed or human lips simulating a reed) in some fashion.

I honestly think you may have been overlooked a critical thing

We are talking about "music", right?

Since the dawn of homonoid civilization, where-ever "music" was played, it was played live

The presenters and audiences were all gathered at the same spot, so to share, or add to, the soundwaves that were at that place

Since the beginning of sound-recording, the advent of (wireless) radio-transmission of sound-recording, this thing we refer as "music" had already been changed

I don't think that's a meaningful difference in terms of invention. Hearing a simple oscillator, even the most casual musician would surely realise an instrument could be made from it. A lot of ingenuity went into the designs from that point, but again, it was a gradual evolution of ideas.

You can't shut off your ears, and they're connected directly to your brain. Unlike other art forms where people direct their attention at what they want to absorb, the waveforms you see in music are already recreated inside your brain before you begin appreciating them.

I think you're hung up on the distinction between musicians and composers.Musicians play music. Composers use instruments to play people.One can be both.

Honestly, they're the people, on the receiving end who most embody Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", as they need beats, bass tracks, synth riffs, etc. But try to get them to pay for, or even credit the original artist, ah, that's where they become capitalists.

Honestly, they're the people, on the receiving end who most embody Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", as they need beats, bass tracks, synth riffs, etc. But try to get them to pay for, or even credit the original artist, ah, that's where they become capitalists.

methinks you haven't paid attention to the liner notes of hip hop albums since the 80's. Sample clearance has become a lucrative stream of income for many a washed-up musician with catalogs that do nothing for them at the moment. They get credited and get paid for the samples all the time though there are some that simply won't allow it (Prince comes to mind).

I think this is probably true of the entire target market of "beat making" software. Although the markets other than hip-hop won't necessarily bother with decent mics, because you don't need human vocals for techno/house/dubstep/whatever. Or any vocals at all, for that matter. People don't have to go out and record their own samples any more either since there's so many collections out there now.

One obstacle has been our software of choice, Reason 6. Not only is it prohibitively expensive, but it is difficult to order, impossible to share between computers, and is anchored by obnoxious security provisions.

In layman's terms they don't like the idea of not being able to use if for free. Pretty much defines the majority attitude in the hip hop industry really.

They are mostly talking about Reason. [line6.com] It's a software simulator for a bunch of real-life studio hardware that musicians used to have to purchase and hook up and find places to put. So, instead of having to spend $50,000 to outfit a studio with keyboards, synths, patch bays, mixers, effects, compressors, cables, etc., you can simulate it all with Reason for something like $450. But to the people in TFS, this is too much money still, and they would like to make a free equivalent. It's noble, but as others have mentioned there are other options that do not have nearly so polished and authentic sounds and interfaces, but are much cheaper or free.

There's already software out there to automatically generate beats, or entire songs for that matter if you so desire. I've listened to the output, and it's crap. I love most of the genres you listed (not so into hip-hop though) but I'm not even all that picky about tracks, but the auto-generated stuff I've heard is worthless. But, don't let that discourage you from improving upon it! I imagine it won't get you as many girls as learning the guitar, though.

There are programs that compose classical music that the average listener could probably not discern from the real thing, and I don't see many people seriously making the argument that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven didn't write "real" music.

Two weeks ago I enjoyed a little demonstration of the latest, most professional and rotten expensive piece of "music prototyping software" at my co-producers projct studio. Don't get me wrong: it's a fine app for certain tasks in -commercial, primarily movie sound track- composition that will make a real composer's life a lot easier. But if you let it just compose by algo, no matter how well elaborated your parameters are, the output is just utter crap.

Seriously though, we are going to see the emergence of "virtual pop stars" designed by committee to be appeal to as many people as possible appear in the next few years. Electronically produced music makes this goal a hell of a lot easier (a robotic arm that can play the guitar or piano as well as a human is probably a long way off).

Seriously though, we are going to see the emergence of "virtual pop stars" designed by committee to be appeal to as many people as possible appear in the next few years. Electronically produced music makes this goal a hell of a lot easier (a robotic arm that can play the guitar or piano as well as a human is probably a long way off).

We already have them. Every single aspect of Justin Bieber / Britney Spears / Beyonce's projection in public life has been fabricated, test marketed, and refined down to the microscopic level. Every non-controversy, image makeover, life-changing interview and comeback has been preprogrammed to push the maximum number of buttons to gather the most attention and make the most profit for the entertainment industry celebrity complex. Why develop a computer program to be a virtual pop star when you have living

We already have them. Every single aspect of Justin Bieber / Britney Spears / Beyonce's projection in public life has been fabricated, test marketed, and refined down to the microscopic level.

Whilst I don't disagree with this at all, a complete fabrication they still need a human being at the centre of it, a human being that will still have issues, problems and more importantly a personality that will need to be worked around.

Whilst that real person is necessary for the fabrication they are just fake,

Every genre has it's good and bad. Listen to modern country music and tell me you don't find it just as shit-tier as hip-hop and I'm calling you a liar. She think's my tractor's sexy! [youtube.com] Yee-fucking-HAW!!!!

Then of course there's The Bieb and Lady Gaga's garbage. And Guns 'n' Roses' and Van Halen's new garbage. And Metallica's garbage. And Skrillex's garbage...

It goes on and on. Hip-hop doesn't have a monopoly on shitty music at all...

She Think's My Tractor's sexy? Really? At least that's about country-ish stuff. You pick that as an example of shite country music over: Online?
Matrix-y background graphics... Lyrics about being a slashdotter, I think. Is a steel guitar and fake draws all that's needed to classify as country music?

I don't need an algorithm to tell me Autotune is the one who should be taking credit for the singing today, not the prepubescent pretty face on stage taking dancing lessons who can't sing for shit.I always thought it would be fun to run Autotune in reverse: take a completely synthesized voice (Siri singing Led Zep's greatest hits), let De-Autotune (TM) screw it up, and run the audio equivalent of the Turing Test on the output.

I've struggled with LMMS for years. I give a try quite often and the end result is torturous. It tries hard to be FL Studio, but "different" but lacks so much that making anything is just entirely too awkward. I've considered contributing to the project but simply don't have the time to invest in it.

I stick with FL Studio and Cubase for my hip hop work (with ProTools M-Powered strictly to send out sessions to studios).

It's free... if you can afford Cubase/Pro Tools. Then yes... use those. But this guy doesn't want to pay... so why would something like LMMS not be good enough to teach someone to make a beat? We're not talking about producing a track for Dr. Diddy, or Jay Snoop.

Why does it seem like, when it comes to software, people don't apply the "beggars can't be choosers" mentality?

"I don't want to pay for it."

"Ok, here you go. I did this in my spare time!"

"That's not what I wanted... this sucks. Spend more of your free time and make it better."

"... ?"

If's not about whether or not it's "free", it's about whether it's functional or not. Your argument is a typical cop-out whenever the functionality of a FOSS app is called into question. If you've made the decision to write something like this and release it for the world to see, then you need to be prepared to address issues people have with the software. Yes, we could always go out and buy another piece of software instead of using that which you wrote for free, but we're giving your stuff a shot to look for that alternative so being receptive to criticism is part of the process. If the authors didn't want anyone to speak ill of their software, they should have kept it to themselves. Part of the open source process is people contributing to it's usability by giving input like "Hey, maybe you could make plugin selection a bit more obvious to the end user, it's a pain to deal with right now". We all may not have coding skills, but our input on workflow is just as valid.

I've tried Rosegarden under Linux and it works pretty well but several key VST plugins I use simply don't work. Were it not for that, I'd recommend it all day long.

FWIW, FL Studio's basic package costs only $49, with a more functional version at $99. While I understand that some people believe that they can't afford $99, if you're really serious about music you will save for it. Same for Cubase: Steinberg offers an entry level version of Cubase for $99 that's rather well featured for the price (serious music can be made with the "Elements" package). EnergyXT is not only cheap (€59), but also cross platform, working on Windows, MacOS, AND Linux!

For the musician on a budget, there are options. FOSS is one of them if you can find an application you like. LMMS is just not that package for me.

Energy/XT is pretty darned nice for the cheap price tag! I use it quite a bit for music projects. I like the ability to wire up synths and effects in a visual way that hearkens back to my patch panel days.

Didn't we make beats in NoiseTracker (remember Mahoney & Kaktus) on the Amiga back in the late 80s? So the sound sucks by today's standards, but the software was simple to use and free.
Why would today's "beat making software" be so expensive?

The source code for NoiseTracker was used as the basis for Renoise [wikipedia.org], which is cross-platform including Linux, but not free. It's a reasonably popular host for composing songs / beats that obviously appeals to a fairly specific group of users due to it's tracker heritage. Most musicians prefer the piano roll for editing MIDI, which is used in most other hosts including Cubase, Ableton Live and Logic (none of which are available for Linux, and Logic is only available on Mac).

Why the hell does this make slashdot?! So we have people with a dream and they are calling for others to help them... Why would anybody do that if they could just as easily help the guys behind great stuff like Ardour, LMMS, Rosegarden, Miep, Hydrogen and the many other applications that aim to do somewhat exactly what these people dream of?!

"Many pieces of software" were started because programmers just started writing them. They proved their worth and got help. I see no code here. Why would anybody capable of writing such software join a bunch of people that have basically nothing to offer but their dream? And, especially, why would these people make slashdot headlines? I'd rather see some more attention to projects that actually have code than projects that are nothing more but an idea.

These days when people want beat making software, they usually want something that will sequence drums, come with sampled instruments, record tracks and have effects all in one package. Of course regular DAW software like Cubase will do this, but from my observation- DJ's along with novices want something simplistic so they can psuedo-produce pieces in a minute amount of time.
So to sum this up ~ Beat making software = easy software for dj's and non professionals.
As for making beats with open source soft

The centerpiece of any hip hop studio is the sampler. There exists a very high quality open source sampler called linuxsampler [linuxsampler.org] but they are not included in any mainstream linux repos because of their bone-headed, legally invalid licence. So you have to build it from source, a painful process that I've never been able to do in under 2 hours. There is a lot of high quality foss studio software out there, but as long as developers keep dropping the ball like this we're going to see more reinventing of the wheel like this and not a lot of progress. An excellent foss program for beat-making I would recommend is qtractor [sourceforge.net], but it does not come with a sampler.

Beat making software is FREE or near-free. Audacity doesn't cost a dime. Paying to clear samples, well that's a topic for another article. As far as making your own sounds, there are tons of free and inexpensive software synths, and free or inexpensive WAV collections (samples or loops). I own a bunch of $2-$5 beat making apps for my iPhone. Native Instruments iMaschine costs $5 and allows you to sample and compose songs using your own recordings/samples. I'm not sure that 'beat making' needs to be much che

As mentioned in TFA, they already use Audacity. I don't know if you've ever tried to make music with just Audacity, but if not let me save you the trouble. It's not the right tool.. it's a waveform editor. Funny enough, of all the studio software you listed, the one they're actually trying to replicate wasn't mentioned- Reason. These people aren't needing strong multitrack recording and mixing ability, they need good software synths tied together into a nice interface.

Cry racism all you want. It doesn't make my words racist anymore than calling these people "artists" makes them in fact artists. I'd have posted a similar comment if the story had been about pop artists but you wouldn't know that because you don't know anything about me.

A lot of the comments have been hating on hip-hop, and well, I can't say I blame them. Most of the stuff you hear is just the same old shit. Some boring harmony over a lifeless beat and some lyrics that are so dishonest that it's almost offensive. But then you get some people who take hip-hop and turn it into something wonderful.

There are/were quite a few jazz guys who are taking the chill groove of hip-hop and fusing it with jazz, adding beautiful harmonies and some honest expression. In the 90's there was

going back to the 80s we had Digable Planets,The Fugees, A tribe called Quest and bay area greats Digital Underground (Tupac was once a member) and bassist Bill Laswell has done some work in that area -fast forward to awesome Hip Hop/Rock experiments like Damon Albarn/Danger Mouse Gorrilaz albums (especially the incomparable Demon Days) -in fact you could just buy almost anything that Danger Mouse or Damon Albarn has done and not go wrong.Not to mention other crossovers like Beck, the Beasties, Japanese gu

It depends. How about projects like PuTTY, OpenTTD, TrueCrypt, Mozilla Firefox, etc? They are quite polished software. I agree with the quality assurance of Linux desktops being in a bit sad state, but OSS in general is not necessarily the way to doom.

Audio software requires using audio engineers and guys who know a lot if math if you want to produce something that can be used professionally. This isn't the type of tasks that the average programmer can tackle.

Why would RIAA do that? They love people creating the stuff, as long as they get a cut of the action.

That's the problem in a nutshell; nobody needs the RIAA to record and album any more, nor to popularize it. That's why the RIAA was always against CD burners and file sharing sites; they are used by RIAA labels' competetion, the indies.

When my daughter was a teenager (she's 25 now), she bought very little RIAA fare, instead going for indie stuff and even local bands (she was into ska and punk, like her frien

Technics 1200's are discontinued, dubplates are no longer something you can easily get made, physical record stores are extremely rare, the selection is lacking at the record stores that have held on...

Then again, if you were willing to spend the money on turntables and records, getting a vinyl controlled mp3 solution wouldn't be a huge jump. And I think a lot of artists do just that....